Those who can’t connect barbaric abuses of Palestinians by Israelis — generation after generation — and the crimes of Oct. 7, have little understanding of human nature, writes Jonathan Cook.
Palestinians in Gaza protesting the February 2013 death of Arafat Jaradat in Megiddo prison. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
For many years I lived just up the road from Megiddo prison in northern Israel, where new film of Israeli guards torturing Palestinians en masse has been published by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.
I drove past Megiddo prison on hundreds of occasions. Over time I came to barely notice the squat grey buildings, surrounded by watch towers and razor wire.
There are several large prisons like Megiddo in Israel’s north. It is where Palestinians end up after they have been seized from their homes, often in the middle of the night. Israel, and the Western media, say these Palestinians have been “arrested,” as though Israel is enforcing some kind of legitimate legal procedure over oppressed subjects — or rather objects — of its occupation.
In truth, these Palestinians have been kidnapped.
Footage uploaded to Israeli media depicts Israeli occupation forces collectively torturing Palestinians held in Megiddo prison.
The video shows prisoners lying face down on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, while being terrorized by dogs. pic.twitter.com/mZOIC1Glj8
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) September 6, 2024
The prisons are invariably located close to major roads in Israel, presumably because Israelis find it reassuring to know Palestinians are being locked up in such large numbers. (As an aside, I should mention that transferring prisoners out of occupied territory into the occupier’s territory is a war crime. But let that pass.)
Even before the mass round-ups of the past 11 months, the Palestinian Authority estimated that 800,000 Palestinians — or 40 percent of the male population — had spent time in an Israeli prison.
Many had never been charged with any crime and had never received a trial. Not that that would make any difference — the conviction rate of Palestinians in Israel’s military courts is near 100 percent. There is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian, it seems.
Rather, imprisonment is a kind of terrifying rite of passage that has been endured by generations of Palestinians, one required of them by the bureaucracy managing Israel’s apartheid-occupation system.
Torture, even of children, has been routine in these prisons since the occupation began nearly 60 years ago, as Israeli human rights groups have been regularly documenting.
View of Meggido prison, on right, from Meggido Hill, in 2007. (Golf Bravo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The imprisonment and torture of Palestinians serve several goals for Israel. It crushes the spirit of Palestinians individually and collectively. It traumatises generation after generation, creating fear and suspicion. And it helps to recruit a large class of Palestinian informants and collaborators who secretly work with Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, to foil Palestinian resistance operations against Israel’s illegal occupation forces.
This kind of Palestinian resistance, we should note, is specifically permitted in international law. In other words, what the West denounces as “terrorism” is actually legal under the principles the West established after the Second World War. Paradoxical, to put it mildly.
The message of Israel’s torture chambers is directed at all of us, not just Palestinians. ‘Black sites’ are about reminding those who have been colonised and enslaved of a simple lesson: resistance is futile.
My latest can be read here:https://t.co/PvaWfxdinV
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) May 24, 2024
The humiliation and trauma systematically inflicted on these hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the wider Palestinian society — and the complete lack of concern from the “international community”, or, worse, its complicity — have inevitably fed into growing religious extremism among parts of a Palestinian society that was once largely secular.
If there is no justice, no redress to be offered by the international institutions created by a West that both trumpets its secularism while also flaunting its Christian values, then, Palestinians conclude, maybe they can find justice — or at least retribution — not through futile, rigged “negotiations” but through greater commitment to violent resistance carried out in the name of Islam.
That explains the emergence of the group Hamas in the late 1980s and its relentless growth in popularity.
Hamas’ unapologetic Islamic militancy contrasted with the more accommodationist secular nationalism of Fatah, long led by Mahmoud Abbas. Support for Hamas was something Israel was only too happy to cultivate. It understood that Islamism would discredit the Palestinian cause in the eyes of Westerners and further bond the West to Israel.
But Israel’s system of torture — whether in “normal” prisons like Megiddo or in the giant open-air prison that Israel made of Gaza — also led to an ever greater determination among groups like Hamas to liberate themselves through violence.
If Israel could not be reasoned with, if it only understood the sword, then that was the language Palestinians would speak to Israel. This was precisely the rationale for the atrocities of Oct. 7.
If you were horrified by Oct. 7, but are not more horrified by what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for more than half a century in its prisons, then you are either in a state of deep ignorance – hardly surprising given the lack of media coverage of Israel’s despotic rule over Palestinians – or in deep denial.
If you cannot see the causal connection between the barbaric abuses of Palestinians generation after generation and the crimes committed on Oct. 7, then you have no understanding of human nature.
You have no inner awareness of how you would act had you, your father and your grandfather been tortured in an Israeli prison, a trauma passed down through families little differently than hair colour or build.
The scenes filmed at Megiddo. The images of emaciated men, broken from their beatings in prison. The disappearance of hundreds of doctors into Israel’s torture chambers. The video of a Palestinian man being raped by Israeli prison guards. The findings by Israeli and international organisations that this is going on systematically.
The horrors are staring us in the face. But too many of us are looking away, reverting to the magical thinking of our babyhoods in which, when we cover our eyes, the world disappears.
The horrors of Israel’s prison system aren’t new. They have been going on for decades. What’s new is that Israel has intensified the abuse. It now relishes atrocities it previously hid away like a dark secret.
Israel is lost. It is deep in a black, genocidal hole. The question is, are you going to allow yourself to be sucked into the same void? Are you going to keep covering your eyes? Does the torture end just because you prefer not to see it?
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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In case you haven’t done this, follow the link in the image above with “my latest can be read here,”
Or use:
hxxps://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/israel-torture-chambers-message-directed-us-palestinians
The problem we’re having is expressing the outrage and horror over what humanity is capable of, (warning) graphically demonstrated in this linked article.
Jonathan is experiencing this difficulty, as indicated by his final words in this piece.
We are not able to come up with words that describe our response including to the utter banality and idiocy of the two major candidates running for the presidency in the USA at this time. From Jonathan’s article as indicated above:
“How might it be wrong – antisemitic, no less – to ponder whether a similar brutal, genocidal racism drove extremists in Germany in 1938 when they rampaged against Jews on Kristallnacht?“
Thank You Jonathan
“Over time I came to barely notice the squat grey buildings, surrounded by watch towers and razor wire.”
Victor Frankl described “long stretches of several rows of barbed wire fences, watch towers, search lights;” sound familiar? It certainly would to a Palestinian. From his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, pg 8 wherein he describes a concentration camp after his detainment and deportation to one of them during the Holocaust.
America is experiencing what Frankl calls a “delusion of reprieve” from what awaits them if they don’t act soon. Palestinians are us and the sooner we see in America the journalists attacked and their homes and offices raided, the doctors who lost their careers or/and their license to practice suspended, the prisons being built all over the USA; the sooner we are able to see how this is going, the more hope there will be for our country and the people of Palestine.
Paula please read my comment 9-6-24 @ Brutal Wish of a Failed Diplomat if you have not done so already.
I often wonder how much of these barbaric imprisonment and torture practices they (the survivors) learned in the concentration camps from their German WWII torturers and guards. Probably a lot.
It seems they are trying hard to re-create the same conditions they suffered then, and inflict them now upon the Palestinians, and appear as ‘victim-abusers’, the innocent and hurt people.
They might have been innocent then, but certainly aren’t now.
On top of that, I was told it was the British that implemented concentration camps in the Boer War.
Blinken’s refusal to open his eyes to reality preferring to stay deep in his original and deep
Zionist groove makes him a certain kind of confidant of President Biden. A groove with
a fine sharp edge that pretends hard at work discriminating the fault of the latest Israeli
sharp shooter hit and murder of an American activist woman. What’s intriguing – if not
surprising – that talking heads – both mainstream and alternative and left-ish nary mention
the nature of Blinken’s influence on President Biden. Some forthrightly question his
(nonexistent or low grade quality) diplomatic skills. Remarking his is the bully approach
to international relations. (Hmm. Kind of Natyanahu-ish? in that way?) Not mentioned is
how Blinken’s sturdy Zionist stripe furthers the skewed view and wimpiness of President
Biden to say that grown up word when the teenager crosses the boundary between acceptable
and not acceptable, danger to other and himself ….”No and no
more bads, Natanyahu.No more bullets, bombs, drones, AI assistance, money. Nada til the
permanent cease fire is sign sealed delivered and announced far and wide.” What’s telling
about the nature of the Israeli’s is their profound capacity to ignore the sounds of compassion
and shared moans of grief and cries of outrage and dismay. Their way is the important, necessary
way. The rest of us can go you know where.
Addressing your last paragraph. With the help of your statement here I wish to emphasize something.
On 9-6-24 @23:33 I left a comment at Brutal Wish if a Failed Israeli Diplomat.
If anyone didn’t read that comment, the longer one, I strongly suggest you do so now.
The topic of the letter I received is AIPAC , “Jewish Community Relations Councils” or JCRC’s which represent further Israeli efforts to poison US politics even further, making the duopoly, our so called two party system, even less responsive to the wishes of “we the people”!
These efforts are every bit as real as the genocide in Gaza. Why? Because the AIPAC’s lobby efforts are the main reason for the U.S. “hands off Israel Policy”. A policy that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians .
CN has been pretty damned responsive to much of what I write in the comments. I seriously doubted my comments of 9-6-24 would make the cut but I was happy to see the effort get posted.
Thank you Jonathon and CN.
It’s the Spirit that gives power to Christian preaching and
Jonathan Cook serves that God of Christians who commands
love of the neighbor, to all of mankind.
So to point out the truth, that so many Americans claiming
to follow Christianity are antichristian religious nationalists,
a kin to Nazi true believers, by describing their “deep ignorance
or deep denial” this preacher also describes a state of American
religious idolatry as: “depth is what the word God means” (Paul Tillich).
What’s funny is that Meggido is better known by another name. Armageddon
And as far as i remember from reading translated “dead sea scrolls” many years ago, it is said the battle to end all battles will be in Har Meggido ( as you say Armageddon). There is much information about the location etc of Har Meggido on the internet.